'cause it's hard to see from where I'm standin'

It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that “neighborhood” is defined primarily by the proximity of other people, not by physical boundary, used as it is interchangeably with “district” or “quarter.” Conversely, it’s hard to forget the nomad lifestyle of many in the city, playing as we all are a gigantic game of musical chairs with the slowly dwindling supply of affordable housing units left.

It’s easy, however, to get lost in the masses – to think of oneself as a supernumerary in great society; another position that needs filling, another mouth to feed – and forget that we are all ad-libbing on a stage in which we are simultaneously actor and audience, a complex mesh of co-dependencies predicated on a set of rules of our own creation. It’s easy to turn inward and eschew the other.

Above all, on the other hand, it’s impossible not to see examples of both sides in just two blocks of this fair city; each interaction a microcosm of the whole. Indeed, on just a minor errand of home to bank to deli to home, scenes unfurled before me to which I became an unwitting actor and participant. One white woman in a beige Honda wished to park in order to enter a storefront bank branch and had unfortunately chosen the loading platform of a construction site when the workers were in the process of removing detritus from the upper floors into a nearby pickup truck. It was a good thing her sunroof was closed for the top of the car was soon blackened with soot.

The four Jamaican laborers filling the pickup thought this a hilarious turn of events and, rolling down the passenger side window of her car, the woman gave them a collective tongue lashing as to their rudeness and unprofessionalism. This only made them laugh harder, hooting at her complete obliviousness as to the provenance of the situation. Indeed, two neighborhood kids who were still in Catholic school uniform sitting outside the next-door pharmacy and a black man just come out the subway station on the corner had tuned into this bit of entertainment and were looking around for others to share their revelry in. I asked the man what was going on, and he only nodded, grinned and cocked his head towards the foreman who had the ignoble task of breaking up the exchange, which only prompted a renewed bid of exasperation from the hapless woman.

Down the next block an tiny old black woman in leopard-print faux-fur overcoat with matching hat was in a heated racial argument on the stretch of benches that collects old fogies like stamps on a passport with two white pensioners who had taken it upon themselves to mansplain, in effect, how her lived experience was not as bad as she said and that she complained too much. This tete-a-tete was raging on when I had entered the deli and asked for cheap eats. A few minutes later and the Yemeni men who ran the joint gave loud welcomes to the very same woman, who was in the process of slowly creaking her way across the street and into the deli.

Once inside, she demanded a gun so she can shoot some people. The elder Yemeni man kindly responded that he could get her one. I remarked that I had heard the conversation she was having and that there are indeed some morons out there on those benches. She replied that “there’s no need to send those men to hell, they’re going soon enough,” and that the people she had intended to strike dead were some unscrupulous malefactors at the bank who had drained her account of some $28,000 in some scheme that preyed on her advanced age. The woman was 93.

The younger Yemeni pointed out that the bank has protections and that they would get her money back. She confirmed such but that until that happened she was stuck with some $300 to live on plus Social Security, and besides that doesn’t give the satisfaction that personal intervention does. The elder Yemeni jokingly suggested that she park her money with him and such wouldn’t happen. She gave him a Look, and he reminded her of his offers for marriage. She replied that she managed to come within spitting distance of 100 because she had only one marriage in her life, and it was to a man who treated her like a queen. She immediately got misty-eyed, and started reminiscing, by which I mean she launched into a tirade about traditional roles in marriage.

The Yemenis took their cue and started looking over the diminutive woman to the line of customers that had piled behind her, and she turned to me because in my rapt awareness to the goings-on I looked like a “decent young man.” She went on about total devotion to one another and how marriage is indeed between two equals, while slowly meandering her way out of the deli, having sated her need to kvetch about her current situation. I exchanged knowing looks with the younger man behind the counter, and like oil and water she blooped her way out opposite the flow of younger Dominicans preparing for nights out and yuppies preparing for nights in.

In two blocks I had witnessed both a social call and an anti-social call: One of neighbors and one not. While it was all humorous, it was also a mark of who and what belongs to where, and how those connections are made: We’re all strangers, but some are stranger than most.

Big Smoke has moved from bigsmokestreetcorner.com to bigsmoke.nyc, following the decade-long wrangle the city had with having its own top-level domain. New York City now shares this distinction with other nominal city-states (Hong Kong, Singapore) as well as cities that apparently want to be associated with being tech savvy (London, Paris, Berlin) but as far as I’m aware it’s the only city whose domain extension is exactly three letters. It is also the only city to limit its domain to locals, so there’s a fair bit of impish glee in being able to snag one.

The old URL will redirect to the new one, and kinks will eventually be worked out. Eventually.

I was asked at one point to weigh in on the psuedo-indigenous naturalism evident primarily in the sorts of summer camps children are sent to when they’re to get away from the city (and their parents’ hair) for a while. Such camps tend to tie the concept of anti-civilization with that of an imagined pan-native culture which they bolster with culturally appropriated artifacts from various nations and tribes across this continent.

Being Cherokee, I made the argument that both the correlation and the appropriation were wrong; a stance that was questioned by proponents of a particular camp primarily in what exactly cultural appropriation can be defined as. This got me thinking, as here I am in the one place in the world where cultural diffusion is more or less omnipresent. Everyone starts accreting the sorts of things they’re surrounded by, and indeed I speak Yiddishisms, cook stir-fry, and otherwise play the cipher as I cross miniature borders on a daily basis. Where is the line crossed between cultural diffusion and cultural appropriation?

I know this line implicitly, because I know what offends me and I know what offends others. For instance, I used to go to Cherokee ceremonies down by the Delaware Water Gap. I no longer go because there are very few natives and even fewer Cherokee in these ceremonies. Most of the proceedings are attended (and often administered) by white people looking to bolster their sense of the world with a little superficial “spirituality.”

I used to call such a phenomenon – white hippies seeking “god” – DIY buddhism, as a reference to the fascination middle-class Americans had with eastern religions (buddhism in specific), starting in the ’60s, that bear little resemblance to the actual meanings and use of those religions, wholly divorced as they are to the context. Yoga, a meditative practice, is reduced to an exercise routine, after pilates and before the free-weights. Indeed, the sweat lodge – a practice not common to the Cherokee but now a regular occurrence in the ceremonies I attended – has been used in a similar fashion as an alternative day spa.

The difference is that instead of reveling in the understandings of another’s culture, what the appropriator does is use that culture as a means of differentiating themselves in the dominant culture: It becomes an affectation – a fashion statement – cherished only in its distinction from the accepted norm rather than its use as a new norm. It is, thus, divorced from meaning and belittles the cultures from whence it came.

I know how that feels to me, because it not only reduces Cherokee culture into a fractured sequence of practices devoid of context but it also conflates Cherokee tradition with that of other nations and peoples, cavalierly flattening entire cultures and the struggles they have had to deal with. I can thus see how that could be turned around to others: Just as I don’t like faith healings and sweat lodges taking over my ceremonies for the benefit of people who aren’t native, so too would I never put my hair into dreadlocks, for I don’t have the same experiences or a direct connection with East African peoples or their diaspora in the Caribbean.

Being a nominally middle-class person with light skin, I could not in good conscious say “my nigga” to a compatriot, for despite having black heritage I have not grown with the same indignities as one who would be compelled to use such a term of endearment and resistance. Indeed, it’s specifically because the word “nigger” used in such a context is one of anger and protest that it’s actually the opposite of cultural appropriation: It’s an oppressed culture taking the terminology of the oppressors as a display of agency and self-determination. To take the term without clearly resembling its implications would then by definition be an act of hostility towards that sentiment.

In essence, that’s where the line is drawn: As a power dynamic. Who becomes as important as what. What’s the difference between white counselors teaching white children the occasional Lakota word at camp, despite not being Lakota, and Mohawk volunteers teaching black children common Lenape words on a field trip, despite not being Lenape? Power. Why does nobody blink when I use Yiddish terms despite having no connection to Eastern European shtetls? Well, the inroads of their diaspora in New York City to the dominant culture: Power. Why are the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans on my block allowed to say “my nigga” despite not having a direct connection to American slavery? A shared sense of underclass under the yoke of racism: In short, power.

It’s a strange calculus to be endlessly aware of power dynamics when it comes to culture, especially considering how little it is directly referenced in public. Much the same as any acknowledgement of differences in socioeconomic status would be decried as “class warfare” by the most privileged, so too do some bristle at the accusation of cultural appropriation, but whether the power dynamic is acknowledged or not, it is still there.

In a nutshell

Words of an urban indian. Musings on the nature of civilized society, city forms and bureaucratic processes, class and race consciousness, complaining, ranting and more ranting, along with whatever the hell else piques one's interest nowadays.

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To quote H. L. Mencken, "The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office."